


These Are Better Days

by adventurepants



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Avengers in the media, Gen, Steve's 21st century education, team feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:15:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adventurepants/pseuds/adventurepants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's tried to watch the news, some—he has a lot to catch up on, after all—but sometimes even that's not real.  “The Daily Show is funny because it's fake,” Bruce had tried to explain to him.  “Fox News is funny because it doesn't know that it's fake.”  </p><p>They try to be patient with him.  He figures, with Thor back in Asgard, he's the closest thing to an alien they've got.  But he's stopped watching the news, anyway.  It gets old, after a while, when you just keep seeing your own face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Are Better Days

“Do you know them?” Steve asks, nodding at the girls on the television.

Natasha looks at him strangely, and he almost thinks she's mad at him, until she smiles indulgently and says, “No. It's been a long time since I've lived in Russia.”

Natasha's nice. Tony calls her “eerie” and “abrasive,” but Tony says a lot of things he doesn't mean. And doesn't say a lot of things he does mean. He's taken a while for Steve to figure out, but then, they all have. Natasha, in particular, isn't like any other woman he's ever met, but after watching the Russian gymnasts at the Olympics, it's started to make more sense.

Steve likes the Olympics. He's still getting used to TV, and Tony's made sort of a game out of steering him the wrong way as far as which shows are fiction and which are something called “reality TV,” but at least he knows the Olympics are real.

He's tried to watch the news, some—he has a lot to catch up on, after all—but sometimes even that's not real. “The Daily Show is funny because it's fake,” Bruce had tried to explain to him. “Fox News is funny because it doesn't know that it's fake.” 

They try to be patient with him. He figures, with Thor back in Asgard, he's the closest thing to an alien they've got. But he's stopped watching the news, anyway. It gets old, after a while, when you just keep seeing your own face.

He's used to being in the public eye, to being called a hero and a freak in the same breath, and Tony's been famous practically his whole life, but Steve knows it's new and uncomfortable for the rest of them. There's one clip he's seen a couple of times, of someone shoving a microphone in Natasha's face and asking her what it feels like to be a hero. She'd shot a pretty impressive glare at the camera before declaring in an even voice, “I'm not a hero.”

Steve knows she hates the idea that anyone's looking up to her. She doesn't see herself as good. But she was there, fighting right next to him in the streets, and he knows better. He'd tell her, if he could figure out the right time to do it. 

“So,” she says. “Are you planning on avoiding Stark all day?”

“I'm not avoiding him,” he answers, but Natasha's giving him that look again, and of course, it's no use lying to the Black Widow. She and Barton are supposed to be the ones without any superpowers, but Steve finds that her uncanny ability to detect lies might as well be called superhuman. That, and the way she can appear in a room without anyone noticing how or when she got there. “I'm avoiding him a little,” he amends.

Tony's gotten it in his head that Steve needs a wingman, and while he truly doesn't mean any harm by it, it's pretty much the last thing Steve wants. He know's it's been seventy years, and that Peggy had a lifetime to get over him, but for him it's still horrifically recent. For him, it was only a few months ago that he said goodbye. And the idea of a wingman reminds him too much of Bucky, always dragging him out on double dates with girls who didn't expect Bucky's friend to be so scrawny.

Thawed or not, he's lost his life, and he's not sure if he'll ever feel like he belongs in this new one.

Natasha just nods, and looks at the TV. She doesn't expect things of him, the way SHIELD does, the way Tony sometimes does without meaning to. If he were going to let anyone be his wingman, he thinks he'd pick Natasha.

She really is something, he thinks. He'll tell her that someday, too.

*

Modern pop music has been one of the greatest mysteries of waking up in a new millennium.

Steve doesn't talk much about the people from his past, though he thinks of them often, but when he hears “Boyfriend” by Justin Bieber on the radio, he looks up at Pepper and says without thinking, “Howard lied to me.”

Pepper blinks and looks at him and waits, and knowing as she does the way Tony feels about his father, she clearly expects Steve to say something a great deal more serious than, “I knew fondue was sexual.”

*

Steve isn't sure the magazine article is such a good idea, but Tony seems to think it's fine. Of course he does—this is his life, this has always been his life. Even Pepper's lost count of how many magazine covers he's been on. “Enough,” is her final answer, but she's smiling as she rolls her eyes.

(Steve has seen the old arc reactor, put in a new display case after the first one was broken. “Proof that Tony Stark has a heart.” But he thinks it's Pepper who's really the proof. She's too smart and too strong and too good to have stuck around otherwise.)

“They'll write about us whether we talk to them or not,” Tony says. “Might as well take the opportunity to say what we want to say.”

Steve grimaces. “They want to take pictures.”

“It's not our fault we're so attractive,” Tony says, shrugging, and Pepper rolls her eyes again, and Steve remembers the hundreds of awkwardly staged photos he was made to pose for during the war, and how he could never quite find himself in them.

*

Natasha and Clint flatly refuse, and Bruce makes the most intensely uncomfortable face Steve thinks he's ever seen on a human being and says, “You can't possibly think this is a good idea.”

“It's an _all right_ idea,” Steve says. “Come on, don't you want people to know you're a person and not just...” 

“A monster?” Bruce finishes.

Steve winces. “That's not what I was going to say.”

“It's all right,” Bruce says. “And I'll think about it.”

Tony's approach with Natasha and Clint is a little more blunt. “Your cover's already blown, anyway.”

It's not the kindest thing to say, maybe, but he doesn't mean it unkindly. And it's true—they're simply not secret agents anymore. But still they want no part of it until Fury (and someone new, someone who's not Coulson) more or less orders them to do it, as it's apparently become important that they get some good press if they're going to be saving the world publicly from time to time.

The photo shoot is not as big a disaster as Steve feared it would be. Thor has returned to Earth just in time, and his enthusiasm at experiencing Midgardian photographic rituals diffuses a lot of the tension. They dress him in actual clothes, and Steve is a little startled to realize it's the first time he's seen Thor in an outfit that doesn't make it painfully obvious that he's not from around here.

Maybe the biggest surprise of the day is that Natasha knows exactly what she's doing in front of a camera. 

“She fake-modeled in Tokyo,” Tony explains, and Steve decides to just go ahead and stop being surprised by anything Natasha does. It'll save him some time, it seems like.

She glances at him and he can see the tiniest hint of a smirk on her face. Clint leans over to whisper something in her ear and she quirks one eyebrow. The two of them are like children, sometimes, twins with a secret language. Backs against the wall.

Steve is in the middle—he's the captain, he's meant to be their leader—and they've dressed him normally too, though he holds his shield in front of him, in front of his team. Tony's arc reactor glows through his shirt—it shines through most things he wears, but today they make sure it does. Thor smiles on command and claps Bruce jovially on the shoulder. “Don't look so concerned, friend! Perhaps they will put these photographs on Facebook.”

When Steve looks at the pictures later, they're not so bad. _That's me,_ he decides. _That's me, and these people are on my side._

*

The interviews are a different story altogether. A woman comes to the tower to speak to the six of them, and she _seems_ perfectly friendly and professional. Her name is Julia Kirk and she promises to keep the experience casual, and says she'd like to speak to them in small groups at first, if that's all right. She sits down in Tony's kitchen with Natasha and Bruce, and Steve heads down to Tony's lab, where his presence has been cordially requested.

Tony has a tablet in his hands. He taps at it a few times, and then Steve hears Julia's voice. 

“Are you spying on them?” he asks as he comes to stand beside Tony. On the tablet is a feed from a security camera in the kitchen.

“Not spying. This is all gonna be in the article, right?”

“Tony.”

“Look, Cap, I have a lot of experience with journalists, and most of them are terrible people. I just wanna make sure this woman isn't...”

“Gonna come after your friends?” Steve finishes. “That's actually... kind of sweet.” He pauses. “Is this camera in the kitchen all the time, or did you-”

“Shh,” Tony interrupts him. “Quiet time now.”

It turns ugly pretty quickly, after a few tersely answered opening questions. 

“Where did you grow up?”

“Ohio.”

“Classified.”

“Are you close with your families?”

“No.”

“Classified.”

“What did you want to be when you grew up?”

“A scientist,” Bruce says, and Natasha looks Julia right in the eyes as she answers, “Alive.”

There's an awkward moment before Bruce bails her out. He talks about an early love of science, of always wanting to know more. He actually smiles when Julia asks him, “That's something you have in common with Tony Stark, isn't it?”

“See, everything's fine,” Steve says.

Tony narrows his eyes at the screen. “Wait for it.”

“How are the rest of you meshing? We all saw how you worked together against the alien army, but isn't it true that Bruce once tried to kill you, Natasha?”

“There it is.” Tony's voice is quiet. He zooms in on their faces and it feels weird and intrusive and Steve wants to tell him to turn it off.

“We shouldn't be watching this.”

But Tony ignores him and stares at the tablet. Bruce looks like someone's kicked... not his puppy, but some expensive piece of lab equipment whose function only he and Tony understand. And yes, a little angry. And utterly unsurprised.

Natasha's face is blank, but Natasha's blank faces come in a number of varieties that Steve's beginning to learn to decipher. This one just means she's pissed off. “Bruce and I are fine.” 

“So you've talked about it?” Julia asks.

“No,” Natasha says, and it doesn't invite further questioning.

Steve knows the signs by now, and knows they're not in danger of the Other Guy coming out to give Julia Kirk a piece of his mind, but he's a little shocked at this stranger's boldness, to sit in front of the man who becomes the Hulk, and prod at topics like this. But they've gotten so much publicity in the past weeks, much of it devoted, by necessity, to convincing the general population that Bruce is not a dangerous man. And they'd all seen it, everyone had seen the footage (shaky, from a cell phone- Steve was honestly more surprised by that than the fact that someone had managed to film it without getting hurt) of the Hulk flying through the air, catching Tony, and laying him on the ground. The Hulk, not smashing.

“Turn it off, Tony,” Steve says.

“No.”

“If I keep watching this, I'm gonna have to go up there and stop it, and I'm not sure I'll be very polite about it.”

“Hm,” Tony says, and starts tapping at the tablet. The video feed shrinks to the top left quarter of the screen. “As much as I'd like to see that, this way's probably going to be more fun.” He starts typing, and Steve doesn't even pretend to know what he's doing, but it becomes clear soon enough as the feed fills up the screen again in time for them to watch the kitchen sink sprayer rise up like a charmed snake, and spray Julia in the face with what Steve is quite sure is an unnatural level of force.

Natasha looks straight into the camera, then—of course she knew it was there—and her voice is drowned out by Julia's shrieking, though Steve thinks she says “Nice work, Tony.”

*

Steve has breakfast with Tony and Pepper the next morning. She's flying out to California in a couple of hours and she'll be in meetings all week. “Don't leave me, Pepper,” Tony says. He is joking and not joking at the same time.

“I'm sure you'll survive.” Pepper places her hand on Tony's chest, and blue light spills out between her fingers through his thin t-shirt. Steve feels like he's witnessing something intimate. He thinks Tony must really love her, if he doesn't even flinch as she lays her palm so casually on the thing that keeps him alive, the thing that makes him both stronger and yet more fragile. Tony doesn't like to be handed things, he's fond of repeating, but Steve's watched Pepper hand him things dozens of times, and he makes no complaint.

Tony kisses her goodbye and Steve looks down at his eggs intently. “Bye, Steve,” she tells him as she's leaving, and leans in to kiss his cheek.

He grins. “Bye, Pep.”

When she's gone, he doesn't mean to ask, but somehow it happens anyway. “Did Howard ever... mention Peggy?”

“Peggy?” Tony says, not looking at him as he clears away the plates.

“Carter. She was my, uh... she was...” he stops, and isn't sure how to describe her. She hadn't been _his_ at all. There hadn't been time.

“I know who she is,” Tony says.

“Ah.”

“My dad and I didn't really talk.”

Steve nods. “Oh.”

Tony looks at him, finally. “I met her, once.”

Steve's chest feels tight, suddenly. He had wondered about that. If Peggy and Howard had stayed in touch, if they'd talked about him after he was gone, if Peggy had known Tony as a boy. “You did?”

“She, uh. She came to the funeral.”

Steve doesn't quite know what to say to that.

“I think she talked to me. I don't really... remember much about that week.” Tony doesn't seem upset. Steve guesses it's been long enough now that it feels like part of another life—that's how he'd started to feel about his mom, anyway.

“I shouldn't have brought it up,” Steve says.

Tony shrugs, and after a moment, says, “He talked about you. A lot.”

“Yeah?”

“When I was a kid I kind of hated you. Thought he liked you more than me.”

Steve looks at Howard's son, at potential realized. _You're a better man than your father,_ he wants to say. “I like you more than him,” he settles on instead.

*

Steve has his interview after breakfast, and since he's already expecting the worst, he isn't surprised when Julia tries to paint him as an outdated relic, holding onto the backwards ideas of the past. Steve has been a little slow to grasp the technology of the future (the present, he reminds himself. It's not the future when you live here.) but he's not a bigot. So when she asks how he feels about the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, he tells her, truthfully, that he believes anyone who wants to should be able to serve their country. She asks him about interracial marriage, gay marriage, women's rights, and when she fails to get even one offensive answer out of him, she decides to try something different. 

“Is it true that, as a super soldier, your regenerative capabilities have caused your body to stop aging?”

Steve swallows. If she can't make him look bad, she'll open a wound. “That was... one of the possibilities we discussed before I was injected with the serum. There hasn't been... I was frozen for a long time so there wasn't... it's unclear, as of now, whether I'll age normally as time goes on.”

“Is that difficult for you?”

Steve wants to laugh. Is it difficult? To have lost everyone he loves once already, and to know that it will happen again? He tries not to think too much about it, he tries to focus on helping people and setting an example, but it was as if the very moment that waking up in the 21st century stopped feeling like a punishment, even darker days promised to follow whatever peace he had found in Stark Tower.

“Yes,” he answers. “It's difficult.”

“How do you deal with that?”

Steve thinks quietly for a moment. “You learn, when you're a soldier—when you're anybody, I guess—not to let the people who are gone matter more than the people who are still here. They matter, of course they matter—but you can't use them as an excuse not to keep going, keep fighting. It's a little like that, I think. I can't let an uncertain future matter more than what's in front of me right now. I have a job to do, I have a purpose. I have people counting on me. I won't let them down, if I can help it.”

Julia looks surprised, and Steve guesses he's done better than she expected. The rest of the interview is over pretty quickly after that, and he shakes her hand politely because he's Steve Rogers, while she does a very good job of pretending not to be disappointed.

*

If Tony watched Steve's interview, he doesn't say anything. But Natasha gives him a long look when he sees her afterwards, not appraising exactly, but quiet and understanding and like she's fitting something into place—so that answers that. She doesn't make a big deal about it but she does nod at him and say “You did well, Steve,” and that sort of makes him feel better.

Thor comes to see him in the afternoon. “Friend!” he says, placing a hand on Steve's shoulder. “You did not tell me of your body's disinclination to age.” He's smiling, because Thor is usually smiling unless something truly awful is happening.

Watching all of your friends grow old and then losing everyone in the world that you care about for a second time is kind of Steve's idea of truly awful, though. “So you saw it too, huh?”

“Tony explained there would be no breach of privacy, as-”

“It's all gonna be in the article. Yeah.”

“Are you upset?” 

“That you watched the interview? No, it's—I think he means well, actually.”

Thor nods. “Asgardians live for many thousands of years, you know.”

Steve had forgotten, but now he remembers Bruce saying something about it. That they were not gods in the same sense as the God that Steve believes in. That they are not truly immortal, but live so long that they might as well be. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I knew that.”

“I mean to tell you that you shall not be alone.” Thor's face is serious, and Steve immediately feels guilty for the way they think of him sometimes. They all like Thor and they respect him, and he's an equal part of whatever weird, dysfunctional world-saving family they're building here. But sometimes it's as if Thor's Cultural Differences make them assume he doesn't know what's going on, when that's not true at all. It's only that his view is different.

“Thank you.” Steve doesn't know what to say other than that.

“When I was a boy I thought... how insignificant must the children of Earth's lives be, to last not even a century. I was wrong about many things in those days. Your lives are short, but they are not small.” Thor is a prince and a warrior and has too much confidence to second guess himself with any real frequency, but when he speaks of his youth, Steve sees regret painted clearly on his face.

“I've never met anyone who wasn't important,” Steve says, and Thor nods, seeming grateful that Steve understands his meaning.

“I have often wondered at how difficult it will be to watch the lady Jane grow old, to whither before my eyes. You do not have such a lady in your life, but I believe you did, once? In your past?”

Steve closes his eyes for just a moment. Someday he will think of her and hurt less, but today is not that day. “I did. I lost her quickly, though. Or she lost me quickly.”

“Quick or slow, I don't believe either are to be envied. I'm afraid we will experience more of both as years pass. Perhaps it would be easier to create distance, to go home to Asgard and return only when I am needed in battle.” He shakes his head. “But I believe there is a strength in knowing you all as family.”

Steve thinks of the Commandos, of Bucky, Peggy, his mother. “You have to take the good with the bad,” he says, “for either of them to mean anything.”

“I don't like to think of a day when we might be the only two of our team left,” Thor says. “But know this, Steven. As long as we both stand, we shall not stand alone.”

*

Steve doesn't watch anymore of the interviews. Tony does, and though Steve turns down the invitation he knows Natasha and Clint sit in on most of them as well. 

“We're spies,” Clint tells him, shrugging. “Hard habit to break, Cap.”

When the article comes out, Steve is expecting a medium-scale disaster. Tony has a bunch of copies delivered to the tower, and they sit around his living room reading together, the six of them and Pepper.

“ _Whenever she wants?_ ” Pepper reads aloud, incredulously, swatting at Tony's arm with her copy. She's presumably reached the same place as Steve: _You've long been known as a serial womanizer, Mr. Stark. Could there ever be a marriage in the cards for you and the CEO of your company, Pepper Potts?_

“Hey, what's wrong with that?”

“I don't appreciate lying,” Pepper says, turning back to her magazine, but Tony slides his arm around her waist and she isn't irritated enough to reject it.

“Wasn't a lie,” he says.

Her eyes flick over to his face and back, but they have an audience, and she's acutely aware of it. Steve goes back to reading.

It's not too bad, in the end. It's as if Julia Kirk had _tried_ to paint them in their worst light—Steve as a man trapped in the past, Thor as clueless, Tony as, well, Tony—but she doesn't quite succeed. He looks across the room at Natasha, shoulder to shoulder with Clint, sharing the same magazine. Because she's Natasha, she knows he's looking, and glances up at him, rolling her eyes. She looks a little bit like she wants to throw every copy of the article into a fire, but the corners of her mouth turn up just barely and she says, “At least we look good.”

“Indeed,” Thor agrees. “I am most pleased.”

Bruce actually laughs a little at that, and Steve flips the magazine closed to look at the cover photo again. It's not exactly what he imagined, this brave new world, but maybe he was meant for this all along.

“All right, that's enough of that,” Tony says, tossing his copy aside. “Who's ready for celebratory lunch?”


End file.
